Generations and Other True Stories Read online

  “My mother,” I said.

  It was a Sunday, and the day before my fortieth birthday. The late-morning sun glinted off the glass towers of Dallas as we hunted two-lane U.S. 67 in the maze of interstates and freeways. It was the church hour and the highway was almost empty. So was the countryside. The Volkswagen churned past white frame farmhouses surrounded by pickups and station wagons, signs that children and grandchildren had gathered at old family homesteads for Sunday dinner. But they were eating or already watching TV, and no children were out. Not even dogs. The gently rolling fields were pale August green, steaming under the huge, empty, brilliant sky.

  “Is this prairie?” Isabel asked. Her Manhattan eyes, not used to horizons, were full of awe.

  “Yes.”

  “It looks like Russia. Something out of Chekhov.”

  Two hours into the countryside, I expected the scenery to become familiar. I hadn’t seen it in more than thirty years, but remembered unpainted houses, ancient cars and farm machinery sitting under trees, hounds lying under porches, cotton fields as brilliant as snow, awaiting pickers trailing long canvas sacks behind them as they moved along the rows on their knees. None of it was there. Where the cotton had been, exotic European cattle grazed on Bermuda grass. The fences that had separated the fields, even those that had divided the farms, were gone. The houses were gone, the sites of some of them still marked by a stand of trees in what had been the front yard or a stone chimney or a cluster of rusting metal. The dogs and people were gone. Everything was gone except the cattle, which hadn’t been there before.

  “It’s all changed,” I said.

  “Are you sure we’re on the right road?”

  “I think so.”

  I found Hico and, farther on, the store at the Olin crossroads. The white frame store that my parents had kept for a short time when I was a baby had been replaced by a squat cinder-block building painted white. It was still a store, but the four or five houses that had stood around it and had been Olin were gone. There was a sign pointing toward Carlton at the crossroads, and the road had been paved. The farms between Olin and Carlton were gone, and much of Carlton was, too. At least it was smaller than I remembered it. But its landmark, the stone bank that had closed during the Depression and later burned, remained, its vault door still hanging rustily, Johnson grass still growing in the cracks of its concrete floor. I remembered some of the houses and even the names of some of the people who had lived in them. One of the grocery stores remained, and the other, across the street, had been converted to hardware. The blacksmith’s shop was gone. The variety store was in ruins, like the bank. The Texaco station was still there. Everything still there was closed. No life was in sight. I stopped the car in front of a redbrick building with the word “Cafe” painted crudely on its window.

  “This used to be the drugstore,” I said. “I got a nickel every Saturday when we came in from the farm, and I would buy an ice-cream cone here. My grandfather died here. He was the deputy sheriff, and he interrupted three burglars here in 1932, just before Christmas. They shot him with his own gun and dumped his body into a ditch. It was snowing. The posse didn’t find him for two days. They kept driving past him but saw only his coat, and they thought he was an old car fender. They caught the burglars, though, two Indians and a white man from Oklahoma, looking for drugs. None of them would say who pulled the trigger, so they all got life. That was five years before I was born, when my mother was sixteen. My grandmother gave me my grandfather’s pocketknife when I was a kid. I still have it.”

  Isabel gazed at the building for some time. “Imagine,” she said.

  “The Depression was rough around here. There were a lot of outlaws. He had no business being a deputy. He was only a farmer, and he took the job as a favor to the sheriff in Hamilton, who was his friend.”

  “Why don’t we get out of the car?” she asked.

  “No. That’s all there is to it, and it’s all different now anyway.”

  We drove past the Baptist and Methodist churches and the Church of Christ, out the road that memory told me led to the farm. As we were about to pass the old cemetery I pulled over and stopped. “Let’s see if we can find his grave,” I said.

  His family plot was near the road. His stone, standing among those of grandparents and parents and brothers and sisters, was larger than the others, etched only with his name and his birth and death dates.

  We found the other too, my father’s father, who had owned the farm. “He was a horseman and a hunter,” I said, “but he had diabetes and the doctors took one of his legs. When they wanted to take the other one too, he couldn’t stand the thought. He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Before I was born.”

  The Johnson grass stood as high as the posts along the fences that lined the road, and the great yellow sunflowers stood even taller, drooping from their stalks, nodding. I had forgotten that so many lanes intersected the road, that so many houses stood at the ends of the lanes. Probably fewer than then, but still too many for my memory to cope with. Most of the houses were too new; and others had been abandoned years ago and were rotten beyond recognition. I studied the natural landmarks, the low bluffs, creeks, stands of trees. They all seemed familiar, like photographs of old relatives whose names have been forgotten.

  Isabel sensed my uncertainty. “Do you know where you’re going?” she asked.

  “It feels right,” I said, “but I can’t be sure. It could be any of these.”

  I turned into a lane that led to a house old enough to contain someone who might remember. When I stopped outside the fence, two black-and-tan hounds crawled from under the porch and stretched in the sun, just as they used to. A woman’s voice spoke cautiously in the dark interior behind the screen door. A man opened the door and stepped onto the porch. He wore a billed farmer’s cap and a stubble of black beard. His dark eyes studied my own beard, my long hair, my red VW.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but I need directions. I’m looking for a place where I used to live when I was a kid.” I told him my name and my father’s name and tried to describe the farm to him.

  The farm, he said, was still called by my grandfather’s name, the Gate Woolley farm. It was sold right after the war, he said, to a fellow named Henson. “I knowed your father once,” he said. “Lived over at Stephenville then. Had two sons, I remember. I guess one of them was you.”

  “No, they would have been by a later marriage.”

  “Oh. Well, your dad lives over at Meridian now, don’t he?” The hounds stood by his legs, wagging their tails.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen him in a long time.”

  He gestured, directing me past the farms of people I didn’t know, telling me to turn left here, left again there, and to go south about a mile. “Turn right,” he said, “and in another mile or two you’ll see the water tank standing back from the road. You can’t miss it.”

  I thanked him and returned to the car. The man went into the house and the dogs crawled under the porch again.

  “They’ll talk about us the rest of the day,” I said.

  “Does he know where it is?” Isabel asked.

  “Yeah, he does, but I still don’t.”

  We wandered, trying to guess which farm was which, which water tank was the one we couldn’t miss. “It’s hopeless,” I said. “Let’s go back. You have an idea what it was like, anyway.”

  “Ask him,” she said, pointing at a pickup coming down the road toward us. “If he doesn’t know, we’ll go back.”

  I stuck my arm out the window and waved. The pickup pulled alongside and stopped. The man was big and old, smiling. I asked him if he knew where the Gate Woolley farm was.

  His smile widened. “I ought to,” he said. “I’ve lived on it since ’45.”

  “Mind if we go look at it?” I asked. “I lived there when I was a child.”

  “Sure don’t,” he said. “Just follow me.” He backed the pickup, turned it around in the ro
ad and headed in the direction from which he had come.

  I would never have found the place. The old house was gone, replaced by a larger, more solid one. The big frame barn was gone, blown down, Mr. Henson said, and replaced by a smaller sheet-metal one. The windmill and tank tower were gone, replaced by an electric pump. Was its small tank the one I was supposed to see from the road? But the fig tree that had grown beside the windmill was there, and the pomegranate bush by the fence, both still yielding, Mrs. Henson said as she poured us ice water in the kitchen.

  The Hensons knew our history and the histories of all who had lived around us. Some remained but most had moved away. She mentioned a boy I had started to first grade with. “He’s had three wives,” she said. “The first one was rotten. She run around on him. The second one died. He’s married to a nurse now. Widow with four kids, and three kids of his own. Getting along well, I hear. He sells Fords over at Stephenville. How long have you two been married?”

  “We aren’t married,” Isabel said. “I live in New York. I’m just in Texas for a visit.”

  “New York! My! You’re a long way from home, just to visit!” Mrs. Henson was storing up mental notes. “How often do you see your daddy?” she asked me.

  “Not since we left here,” I said.

  “Really? He lives at Meridian now,” she said. “He has heart trouble, they say.”

  “Mind if I look around outside?”

  “Help yourself,” Mr. Henson said. “Better stay out of the fields, though. The snakes are bad this year.”

  Less had changed than I thought. The old corncrib, where my father used to kill rats and copperheads, was still there. So was the stone watering trough, down by the barn, and the weathered old smokehouse, which had served as a storeroom in our day. I had found my grandfather’s trunk in there, and opened it and discovered his pipe and reading glasses and straight razor and hypodermic syringes. I took them to my mother and asked if I could have them. She put them back and told me never to open the trunk again. My mother’s garden was still behind the smokehouse, still yielding, I guessed from the withered bean vines and cornstalks. Gazing at the far field, down by the creek, I imagined I saw my father on his tractor, and myself carrying him a jug of water.

  “We just passed the road to Meridian,” Isabel said. “Let’s go by.”

  “Why?”

  “To see where he lives. Aren’t you curious? We’ve got time.”

  I took the road. We stopped in the town square, and Isabel got out and asked an old man where my father lived. “He must be important,” she said, getting back into the car. “He asked, ‘The business or the residence?’”

  The residence was a mile or two outside the town, easily recognized by the neat white wooden fence that the old man had described and the neat white barns and brick house that sat about fifty yards back from the road. Even in the dusk it was obvious that he had prospered. I drove slowly, trying to take it all in and keep my eyes on the road at the same time. As we passed the gate I happened to glance up the driveway.

  He was sitting in a chair in his backyard, silhouetted against the buttermilk sunset. From the way he was sitting, the slope of his bones, I recognized him. “That’s him!” I said. “I’m going to say something to him!” I turned the car and headed into the driveway.

  “What are you going to say?” Isabel asked.

  “I don’t know.” My heart was beating fast. I was almost giddy. I drove up the driveway, into the backyard, and stopped a few feet from his chair. A gray-haired woman was sitting facing him, hidden from the road by a shrub. She looked up, alarmed. I knew then that I couldn’t identify myself. She might not know I existed. I got out of the car and walked to my father and stood facing him, my back to her.

  He was heavier, a little gray at the temples, but he hadn’t really changed. He sat in khakis and white undershirt, barefoot, as he always did. His cheekbones were as high, Indianlike, his eyes as dark and steady through his glasses. He held a chew of tobacco in his cheek and didn’t move, only stared into my eyes, never looking away, saying nothing.

  “I seem to be lost,” I said. “Can you tell me how to get to the Dallas highway?”

  “Which way you coming from?” he asked. His voice was as steady and dark as his eyes. It hadn’t changed.

  “From Meridian.”

  “Well, you missed it. Go back to town. A sign in the square tells you which way. Highway Sixty-seven.”

  I made no move to go. We kept staring into each other’s eyes. He frowned slightly, as if trying to recall something. The woman behind me coughed and shifted in her chair.

  “How’s that again?” I asked.

  “Highway Sixty-seven’s the one you want. Go back to Meridian. There’s a sign in the square with an arrow pointing to Sixty-seven. Turn that way. When you get to the highway, turn right. It’ll take you right to Dallas.” He didn’t move, didn’t gesture.

  I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. “Much obliged,” I said. I felt strangely light, as if relieved of some dark, indefinite duty. I turned toward the car.

  Isabel was staring through the windshield, wide-eyed. When we were past the gate she asked, “What did you say to him?”

  “I asked directions to Dallas.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I asked him to repeat it.”

  “He knew you. His eyes never left you. It took my breath away.”

  “Maybe he thought he ought to know me.”

  Isabel touched my arm. “Don’t just leave it at that,” she said.

  The next morning I wrote to Ted and Pat. “I’m having a special birthday,” I said. And I wrote to him and said, “I’m the man in the red car, and I’m your eldest son.”

  Only Ted and Pat replied.

  “Maybe he never got the letter,” Isabel said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  I remember seeing Audie Murphy on the cover of Life with his Medal of Honor hanging around his neck. The most decorated American soldier of World War II. He looked about twelve years old. As I was growing up, I saw all his movies, I think. Or nearly all. He never seemed to grow older, maybe because he already was old.

  The Hero’s Hometown

  The young woman at the cash register in Woody’s store regards the visitor with blank wonderment. “I never heard of him,” she says.

  “Audie Murphy. The most decorated soldier of World War II. He was from here.”

  “Oh. Well, I wasn’t born then.”

  She hasn’t read the historical marker that stands forlornly beside U.S. 69 on the southern edge of town: “Most decorated soldier in World War II. Born 4.5 miles south, June 20, 1924, sixth of nine children of tenant farmers Emmett and Josie Killian Murphy. Living on various farms, Audie Murphy went to school through the eighth grade in Celeste—considered the family’s hometown.”

  The marker’s flat prose goes on to sketch Audie’s childhood of bleak poverty, his war record of extraordinary courage and bravery, his career as a movie actor. He was one of the most popular Western stars of the 1950s, but his most famous role was as himself in To Hell and Back, his memoir of his war experiences.

  The marker’s last lines tell of his death in the crash of a private plane in 1971. He was forty-six years old, survived by a widow and two sons.

  To those born after V-E Day, it’s just history, as remote from their own lives as the War of the Roses. But a few in the town and the surrounding countryside still remember the baby-faced buck private who marched away to fight the Nazis and the somehow different first lieutenant who returned three years later as the most honored soldier in American history.

  Audie was credited with killing or capturing more than 240 German soldiers. He had received a battlefield commission and thirty-three military citations and awards, including the Medal of Honor and every other medal for valor that the United States can bestow, plus three awarded by France and one by Belgium. He was wounded three times. When he was discharged, his face was on the c
over of Life. And when he came home, he wasn’t yet twenty-one years old.

  Audie’s life was never easy, his old friends say. Even after the war, even while basking in the nation’s adoration and winning wealth and fame in Hollywood, he always seemed under an invisible burden that he couldn’t lay down.

  “He come back here after the war in a brand new Buick convertible and decided we needed to go rabbit hunting in that car that very night,” says Monroe Hackney, Audie’s closest boyhood buddy. “We went flying over them back roads. We had a ball. But Audie never was really happy after the war. He never could get settled down. The war had a whole lot of effect on him.”

  “He was a very private person,” says Mr. Hackney’s wife, Martha. “He was shy. He didn’t like the praise he got when he come home. He said the real heroes of the war was those that was killed. He sat down and visited with me for two hours one morning after Monroe had gone to work. He told me things. He wasn’t happy with Hollywood. He said, ‘Martha, I think I should buy a section of land in West Texas, and you and Monroe can live on it. It would be a place for me to hide out. I am so tired of crowds.’ ”

  He never bought the land in West Texas. He never lived again in Celeste after the war, nor in the community of Kingston, where another historical marker stands near the site of his birth, nor in Farmersville, which erected a stone monument to him in its square, nor in Greenville, whose public library has an Audie Murphy Room full of photographs and paintings of him, nor in Addison, where he owned a ranch for six months, then sold it. (His house is now Dovie’s restaurant.)

  “Every town in this area from Bonham to Greenville claims to be where Audie Murphy lived,” says Danny Lipsey, proprietor of Lipsey’s Grocery in Kingston.

  But Audie remained in Hollywood, a place whose culture he hated, according to his biographers. There he married a starlet and divorced her and married again. He gambled heavily and suffered recurring nightmares about the war, and would wake up screaming, gun in hand, and shoot at mirrors, lamps, and light switches.